There are no more passengers. Still the
streetcar makes the daily run from the city.

Sand covers the tracks. The motorman stops
the car at every corner and comes down with his broom and sweeps the track clean.

The flanged wheels of the car mill the sand
till it no longer settles but hangs in the air like white smoke.

When the wind comes off the ocean the smoke
is punched and buffeted and blown into the shapes of shades and ghosts that float and loom
and shrink in their anguish through the streets of empty bungalows.

The sand rises in the street to the level of
the curbs. The tracks are no more than thin intermittent glints of sunlight. One ordinary
day at the last stop, at the foot of the dunes, the car slips gently atilt and the
motorman abandons it without a backward glance.

The wind sandblasts the paint off the car
till it is down to the wood. Eventually the wood bleaches white. In that year it is very
beautiful.

The wind blows out the windows and sand fills
the aisle and piles on the seats in the shapes of slumped bodies.

Terns fly in and lay their eggs and gum everything up with
their guano and feathers. The car becomes a cheap symbol of civilization in ruins.

One winter a hurricane destroys the dunes and fills the car
with seawater. The car lists like a sinking ship, half of it buried in a newly formed tide
pool. Marine life begins to subsist there. Clams and crabs burrow in the sandwater.
Minnows swim through the windows and snappers chase the minnows into star shaped sprays of
watered light.

The streets of bungalow have been flattened. The wind blows
through the stacked housewalls. Sections of roof rise and sail through the air. The
utility poles tilt and topple and the electric wires hang in loops.

On the land horizon to the west the city skyline advances.

As the tide pool fills one day the underwater barrier is
breached, the ocean breaks in, and the streetcar is lifted from its seabed and begins its
stately drift out to sea.